Chapter 2 The Fen Leases

The fen lay east of the priory, a mile of flat ground that the river Amel flooded each spring and withdrew from each summer, leaving behind the black, fat soil that made the hay grow thick as a man's beard. It was called Harrowfen, and it was the reason the house ate. The priory held fifty acres of it in several parcels, and from those acres came the winter hay for its few cattle and its forty sheep, the turf that burned in its hearths, and the reeds that roofed the barn. The mill stood at the fen's south edge, on the Amel, where the water ran fast enough to turn a wheel, and the mill ground the priory's corn and the townsmen's corn, and took its toll in meal, a measure out of every measure, which was the slow steady income that kept the candles lit and the guest-hall stocked and the sisters in shoes. Strip the house of Harrowfen and it would not starve the first year, or the second. By the fifth it would be selling its plate. Aldith knew the worth of every acre the way she knew the worth of every leaf in the cartulary, because she wrote the accounts as well as the charters, and had done since her father died and left her his bench and his reputation and very little else. Hamo had been the scribe of Nethmarsh before her, and a good one, and when he began to lose his sight he had taught her in secret, at night, by the light of a rush dip, saying that a woman who could write was safer in the world than a woman who could not, because a woman who could write could always be paid. She had believed him. She still believed him, most days. On the morning after Michaelmas she went down to the fen with the prioress's bidding in her hand, to record the cutting of the turf and to count what the priory's own tenants had taken, so that the accounts would be right. Tibba went with her to carry the ink and the little table that folded, because Aldith would not write on her knee like a market clerk; she liked a flat surface, even in a field, and she had taught the girl that a straight line ruled by eye was worth nothing next to a straight line ruled by rule. The fen was full of men. Not the priory's men. Strangers, in the grey and russet that Sir Fulk of Wetherlaw put on his servants, and they were cutting turf in long straight lines, stacking it in cocks to dry, and there were more of them than one tenant's share of the fen should ever have needed. A cart stood on the causeway, half loaded, and two boys were leading a third horse toward it, and a man with a staff was calling the measure and marking the ground with pegs. Aldith stood at the edge of the fen and watched them for a while and said nothing. "That is our turf," Tibba said. "That is the house's ground. They are past the boundary, they are past the two willows—" "I can see where they are." "Then we should say something." "We should do exactly what the prioress sent us to do, which is to write down what we see, with the hour and the day and the names if we can learn them." Aldith set down the folding table and opened it and laid out a clean half-sheet and weighed its corners with two stones. She uncorked the ink and dipped and wrote, at the top, the day of the month and the year and the hour; then she wrote the bounds as she knew them, the two willows and the old ditch and the Amel, and then, in a careful hand, the number of men and the number of cocks of turf and the place the pegs stood. The man with the staff saw her writing and came over. He was a big man with a broken nose and the easy confidence of one whose master owned the ground he stood on, or had decided that he did. "What are you putting down?" he said. "An account," Aldith said. "Of the turf cut this morning, on this ground, by those men, at this hour." "On whose ground?" "On the priory's ground, past the two willows, which is Harrowfen." The man laughed, and it was not a cruel laugh, only the laugh of a man who had been told what he wanted to hear by a person he trusted. "The fen is my lord's," he said. "It always was. Your nuns have been renting it these three lives, and the last of the three is dead these ten years, and my lord is only now minded to take up what is his." He looked at her table and her ink and her half-written sheet with a kind of tolerant interest. "You can write that down too, if you like." Aldith wrote it down. She wrote the man's words, and the fact that he said them, and the hour he said them. A thing said was a thing that could be quoted. That was the whole of her power, and it was a real power, and it was also only that. When she brought the sheet to the prioress, Wymarc read it twice and set it down and looked out of the window at the fen for a long moment. "Three lives," she said. "That is the first time I have heard them put it in words." "Have they said it before?" "They have taken turf before. They have turned their beasts on in the autumn. Each time I have written to Sir Fulk and each time he has answered that his men were mistaken, and the turf was paid for, and the beasts strayed." Wymarc's mouth, which was thin and had been thin for years, grew thinner. "To be told in words that the fen was leased is different. A lease can be proved. It can also be disproved, if you have the deed that made the grant." "Then we have the deed." "We have the deed in the cartulary," the prioress said. "The foundation charter of the house. The original was kept in the chest, and the copy is in the register you are making." She paused. Her hands lay on the desk. "The original is not in the chest. It has not been in the chest since last winter, when the register was rebound and the chest was carried down to the hall so the work could be done by the fire. I am telling you this because Godith has already told you half of it, and half of a thing is a dangerous thing to carry." Aldith felt the floor of her own certainty shift, a hand's breadth, quietly. "Where is it?" "I have sent to ask. The man who did the binding has been asked. He says he returned it. The chest was in the hall for three days and any hand in the house could have reached it." Wymarc looked at her then, and her gaze was steady and tired and not unkind. "You are the only one here who can read the register as a learned person reads it, Aldith. So I ask you plainly, and I ask you to answer plainly, and then we will not speak of it again until we must. Did you see anything amiss in the old register, when you worked from it?" Aldith thought of the shaved parchment under the blue initial, the ghosts of letters running under the gold. "Yes," she said. "I saw something amiss. I do not know yet what it means." "Then find out," said Prioress Wymarc. "Find out what it means, and tell no one but me, and pray that it means less than we fear." ---